DIY Laundry Detergent

I realize I'm probably the last Pinterester on the planet to tackle the project of making my own laundry detergent, but if you've ever researched it yourself, you'll forgive me. There are a TON of laundry detergent (sorry, laundry soap) recipes out there, and each of them had their pitfalls. I got so confused and frustrated over the couple of days (yes, days) it took me to sift through the information (and I'm still probably missing out on something). So, to make it easier on you, I broke down my search into manageable bites.

#1: Fels Naptha-Washing Soda-Borax

By far the most common recipe, I saw both liquid and powder versions with equal frequency. I would have jumped right on the boat except for all of the green bloggers posting how harmful Fels Naptha and Borax are to the environment. Now, I'm not a "crunchy granola mom" by any stretch of the imagination, but after hearing that Borax has been linked to infertility in men, I decided I wasn't going to use it. I did find a very helpful blog post listing the reasons why Borax is perfectly safe for cleaning but having a baby with a genetic disorder makes you take your fertility very seriously. So for me, it was out.

(FYI: I also found plenty of eco-bloggers who were uncomfortable with the fact of Fels Naptha using a stoddard solvent in their soaps, until I found out that the company no longer uses this as an ingredient. There may be other objections to this soap, but I'm not familiar with them.)

#2: Washing Soda-Soap-OxiClean

Once I cut out the Borax, I had to think about what to replace it with. A lot of recipes called for good, old-fashioned, Billy Mays-approved OxiClean. Now, I've never used the stuff, so I wasn't sure about it's colorfastness (is that a word?) or how it would hold up in my water. I use only cold water in my machine, and I'd heard that OxiClean doesn't dissolve in cold water (and thus doesn't work as well), so the powder version was out. I thought maybe I could use it in a liquid version, but found out that sodium percarbonate (the active ingredient) just turns into hydrogen peroxide, which loses its effectiveness once it is taken out of the light-sensitive container and mixed with water. So OxiClean was out. If you want to make a powder version and if you wash all your clothes in hot water, then rock on, Covergirl.

#3. Grated vs. Liquid

To be honest with you, grating soap over a cheese grater was NOT on my to-do list. I was planning on using either a liquid soap (such as Dawn or liquid castile soap), or microwaving a bar of Ivory or Fels Naptha. What does that do, you ask? Well, apparently these soaps (not just any soaps, but these two) turn into a weird foam when microwaved. When it cools off, you can crumble it easily with your hands into soap crumbs...no grating needed! Sounded cool, but again I worried about using this detergent in cold water. Would it dissolve well? Would it leave a residue? I've heard that all the ingredients should dissolve in water w/o a problem, but I decided to go with the liquid version, anyway. I am open to making a powder version in the future.

#4. Answering the "Residue" Question

Let me say this one more time, just to really drive home the point. I read a TON of laundry detergent recipes. A lot of bloggers and commenters couldn't stop gushing about how much better the homemade stuff was than the store-bought stuff. Not just cheaper, but cleaned better, was less irritating on the skin...yada yada. The other commenters mentioned how they had to stop because their clothes started to look dingy or smell musty, or feel weird so they had to switch back to Tide.

More than anything, this worried me. I was doing this to save money, but if we had to buy all new clothes because ours were ruined, that pretty much killed the point. So I did some more research (surprise!) and found that most residue problems were caused by the soap not rinsing cleanly due to hard water.

Turns out, there is a very simple test you can do to see whether your water is hard or soft. I have no hard water problem, but it turns out that Epsom salt works as a water softener (you can use Epsom salt to make your own fabric softener crystals, which I did).

You can also use vinegar in your fabric softener compartment or Downy ball to help cut through the soap residue, if you think it might be a problem. (I used both the Epsom crystals and the vinegar rinse in my trial run. There is no vinegar smell AT ALL.)

#5. Simple Liquid Laundry Soap Recipe

Which led me to my laundry soap recipe, which I adapted from this blog here.

1/2 cup washing soda

1/2 cup castille soap

5 cups almost boiling water

I actually couldn't find washing soda at Target, but it turns out you can make your own washing soda out of baking soda. So that's what I did. Just make sure you start with more baking soda than you think you need; you'll lose a little in the cooking process. I made a bunch of washing soda and stored the rest in a jar in my laundry room.

I boiled the water, then poured 1/2 c. washing soda into the hot water to dissolve. Don't inhale the steam. Then I poured the water into an old lemonade container and topped it off with 1/2 c. of Dr. Bronner's peppermint castile soap. It smelled very strongly of peppermint, but in a good way. It also looked EXACTLY like lemonade, which really threw off my husband when he saw the old lemonade container on the kitchen counter.

D: Oo! Lemonade!

Me: Don't drink it. It's not lemonade!

D: (blank stare)

Me: It's laundry detergent.

D: Can we move it out of the kitchen then? So I don't kill myself?

Good thing I didn't get the citrus-scented soap.

#6: The Results

Now to try it out! All of the ingredients are color safe, but I'm nothing if not overly cautious, so I just threw a load of pajamas together. I don't care if they get ruined.

The directions said to use 1/2 c. per load, but I always kinda eyeball my detergent amounts anyway, so I just splashed some in there. But first, I smeared some olive oil on a pair of shorts to check the grease-fighting power!

As you can see, the detergent didn't do a great job on removing the olive oil stain from my clothes. However, this was a purposeful stain, not an "oops-I-accidentally-got-a-drop-of-tomato-sauce" stain. I sloshed a good teaspoon of it on there. So I'll either add more soap to my large bottle, or stick with Shout or something for really bad stains. (I'll probably end up making my own homemade Shout later, but I've heard plain ol' Dawn works really well, too.)

I would like to point out that I actually did get a drop of tomato sauce on one of my white shirts and forgot to pre-treat it. The store-bought stuff didn't get it out, either.

In the end, though, my pjs came out smelling like...well, nothing. They didn't smell like a mountainside on a dewy morning, but that's usually due to chemicals and artificial fragrances. They also didn't smell like sweat or dirt, either. So I'd say they got pretty clean.

#7: The Cost
 The only expense worth mentioning was the castile soap, which was about $16 for a 32 oz. bottle.

So if I use 1/2 c. of castile soap for each batch, then a bottle of the soap will make 8 batches of detergent. I estimate that each batch will do at least 12 loads (possibly more), so that's 96 loads of laundry per bottle of castile soap. Roughly $18 (if you factor in the cost of the baking/washing soda) total, or 18 cents a load. Not as cheap as the powder versions I've seen, but cheaper than name brand. Apparently, you can use Dawn dish soap instead of castile soap. I'm not sure what that does to the environment, but I'm willing to bet it's not too terrible. Considering they use it to clean off ducks after oil spills.

The bars of castile soap ran about $5 at Target, which is much cheaper, but would have only made one batch of laundry soap. However, you only need to add 1-2 Tbsp of the powder soap per load, so it might go a lot further.

Since we don't have any other detergent in the house, I'll keep using this and see how it performs over time.

Update: Nothing against the DIY-ers, but this one was a dud. Maybe I was using the wrong soap, maybe I should go with an OxiClean recipe after all, but it just wasn't getting stains out of our clothes. I know, I know, I should have been prepared for this. But I wasn't ready to change how I do laundry. I love being able to just throw the clothes in and know that the little spots and splatters are going to come right out with no pre-treating. So I cracked and told D to pick up some Tide once I ran out of my stuff. Sorry, crunchy granola moms.